Film Festivals in October

The Baku International Film Festival stages its seventeenth edition October 21-31, 2026, backed by the Ministry of Culture and the Azerbaijan Film Agency with the Nizami Cinema Center as its anchor venue, a run of premieres and regional competition that overlaps the jazz festival's tail to make late October Baku's culture fortnight. Azerbaijani cinema's own lineage runs back to 1898 oil-boom newsreels, among the earliest film footage in the Muslim world, and the festival leans on that history while programming the Caucasus and Turkic new waves that rarely reach Western screens. The independent DokuBaku documentary festival adds an off-grid counterweight in the same season.

The Busan International Film Festival is Asia's premier film event: ten October days when the sail-roofed Busan Cinema Center and the Haeundae beachfront become the continent's film capital, with the Asian Contents and Film Market running alongside and premieres that set the year's Asian cinema agenda. Founded in 1996, BIFF built its reputation on discovering new Asian directors rather than importing Western prestige, and the open-air ceremonies at the Cinema Center's outdoor theater are the festival's signature image. Around it sits Busan itself: Jagalchi fish market breakfasts, beach mornings, and a city that treats the festival as a civic holiday.

Film Fest Gent is the biggest film festival in Belgium and one of the more distinctive in Europe, with a specialism that sets it apart: the relationship between film and music. Held every October in the cinemas of Ghent since 1974, it screens around 130 features from across world cinema over eleven days, and since 2001 it has staged the World Soundtrack Awards, the leading prizes for film and television composers, capped by a gala concert where a symphony orchestra plays the year's nominated scores. That focus draws composers, directors and a strongly local audience rather than a red-carpet circus, and the festival spreads through a compact, canal-laced medieval city that is easy to navigate on foot. For anyone who cares about how a score shapes a film, or who simply wants to catch the autumn's award-season titles in a walkable Flemish setting before they reach wider release, Ghent in October is the place.

The Tokyo International Film Festival is the only Japanese festival accredited by FIAPF, the body that ranks the world's major competitive film festivals, and it sits second in Asia only to Shanghai in scale. It gives festival-goers something the bigger European festivals rarely do: a genuine, deep pipeline into Japanese and wider Asian cinema, screened in a city with the infrastructure and film culture to support it properly, alongside a real shot at premieres and industry access through its affiliated content market. For a traveler who wants to combine a major film festival with a first (or repeat) trip to Tokyo, it is a rare case where the destination and the event are equally the draw.